


This is the Way the World Ends

by Stephquiem



Series: Brain Trust [5]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Alternate Universe, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Interspecies Relationship(s), M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ruminations on Depression, it's the end of the world as we know it, there are no happy endings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-04 18:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11560971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stephquiem/pseuds/Stephquiem
Summary: This is the way the world ends.Not with a bang, but a whimper.





	1. Ben

**Author's Note:**

> The title (and summary) are from "The Hollow Men" by TS Eliot.

I couldn't feel my arm.

This was supposed to be cute, right? Wasn't this a common romance trope? Guy lets his arm go numb rather than move his sleeping girlfriend. Except "girlfriend" was complicated. Hell, even the gender neutral "partner" was complicated. 

More than that, though, a lack of sensation in my arm, the inability to move a vital part of my body,  sent rolling waves of anxiety through my gut. Stupid. _So_ stupid. It was not the same. I flexed my other hand, the one not currently pinned under the weight of Jenny leaning into my side. I bent each finger individually except the pinky that could never bend without the ring finger curving with it. I forced it anyway, until it sent little tremors of breathless pain up my arm.

"Priton." Just because the body was asleep didn't mean the Yeerk was. I looked down at where Jenny's head was leaning on my shoulder, trying to remind myself that this had felt sweet only a few minutes ago. There was no response, but that didn't mean anything. "Priton, are you awake?" When nothing happened still,  _"P."_

Eyes squinted open, in what might have been a glare. I'd never realized how much the way the rest of the face moved affected what expressions I used to think were all in the eyes. Instead of how annoyed I knew he must be, Priton looked like he was trying to read the last line on an eye chart.

"You're going that way," I warned, pointing with my chin. I could have asked him to wake Jenny so they could move. But instead I pushed, as gently as I could, the two of them sideways. We were sitting on their bed, in their room, so when I pushed, at least they had somewhere soft to land. I heard a grunt, but I was already up and on the other side of the room, sliding onto the spare bed.

Priton sat up. At least, I thought it was Priton. It was so hard to tell sometimes, even here, where there was no need to pretend. "Are you okay?" they asked. When I didn't answer, "Ben?"

"Give me a minute." I closed my eyes, breathed in deep through my nose, and began working the muscles in my arm. I could feel pins and needles up and down my arm, like welcome friends. God, this was stupid. A numb arm was not the same as losing all control of my body. It wasn't. I kept telling myself that I should be fine. For God's sake, I'd voluntarily let Priton back into my head. Things were _better_.

Except they weren't really. As much as I wanted to be angry at Priton at moments like this, to let the old resentment boil up to the surface from wherever it had escaped to, this wasn't really his fault. All of my nightmares featured being stuck down in that hell pit that was the main Yeerk pool, and true, Priton was in most of them, but they'd started to fade off now. Things had been getting better. My feelings were still complicated as hell, but I thought I could live with this. This bizarre, relationship-esque thing that was happening, with someone I had hated before. I wasn't sure when I _stopped_ hating him, but I could accept this change. It was easier to fall into than I'd expected it to be. I could get used to this.

But there was no time to get used to anything. Brain Trust's spies brought back increasingly dismal reports, and things were only going to get worse. The time estimates they brought back were numbered in months now, not years. When I looked outside now, I half-expected to see a Mad Max kind of hellscape, but it all looked the same as it ever did. 

When you're a new, involuntary host, you have all these dreams and fantasies of being rescued. Or at least, I did. Maybe someone will realize something's not right with you. Maybe the president or the military or whoever would figure out what was going on. But the longer things went on, the more likely it was that the people around you were fighting their own futile battles inside their heads, and the fewer people in the government and the military there were who didn't know exactly what was happening. Just not in the way you'd hope. External saviors weren't much better, either. I knew that there were Andalites, somewhere, fighting the Empire, but where were they? Even if they came, I'd heard from Yeerks at Brain Trust who'd been around for awhile--veterans of older invasions--that the Andalites' idea of "saving" was not something I'd want any part of, and they were unlikely to make a distinction between the Empire and fringe groups like ours, anyway.

Priton/Jenny were still watching me,  though they'd sat up now and were sitting with their knees pressed into their chest. My trip to Anaheim with Jenny was three months ago. We kept talking about going somewhere else. With Priton. Without Priton. Maybe I'd let Priton reinfest me and he and I would go somewhere on our own. I offered. I didn't mean it. Something fundamental had changed since Colorado, and I wasn't quite sure what it was. Maybe it was just that this--whatever this was--could only work if I had full body autonomy. I was sure that was at least part of it, anyway, even if I didn't know how big a part.

"You're going to give yourself arthritis if you keep doing that."

I looked down, only now noticing that I'd started methodically cracking the knuckles on my right hand. "That's a myth," I said, but I still dropped my hands. "I doubt I'm going to have time to develop arthritis, anyway."

There was a beat of silence, and then, "You can get arthritis in your twenties."

"Yeah? How do you know?" I didn't actually doubt it. Talking calmed me.

"Noah's a doctor. Well. A resident, anyway, but still an MD."

My lips twitched into an almost smile. "So you're an expert on medicine because you _know_ somebody who's a doctor?"

Jenny's face contorted into the expression they both always made when they thought I was an ass. I liked that expression a lot more than I liked the one they made when I worried them. It didn't last, though, because soon it was changing into a different expression that I liked just as little as worry--guilt. "What did I do?"

It was definitely Priton, then. Only Priton asked questions like that, and only Priton had to make it about himself. "You didn't do anything," I said, because  _you let your host fall asleep_ was stupid. I'd asked Priton once why Yeerks didn't just keep their hosts awake until  _they_ got tired. I knew that a Yeerk was perfectly capable of waking up a host when they wanted to, after all. Priton had told me, in an exasperated tone, that most Yeerks understood that running their hosts ragged was, at best, irresponsible. I don't think he meant it that way, but the way he'd said it made me feel like a toy a child might mistreat and discard. 

I stood. "I should go to bed."

Priton unfolded himself and stood, too. "You don't have to go."

I smiled for real this time--I was getting better at that--and said, "I feel like Nick's going to worry if he comes home at five in the morning and I'm not there." Somehow there were still new people coming in. I didn't know if I should be glad of that or not.

Priton snorted. "No he's not."

He was probably right, but still. "Even so." I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to their forehead. The top of Jenny's head came up to the middle of my forehead. Sometimes I imagined what it would be like if we had a normal relationship. If I could take Jenny out somewhere. I don't know what we would have done. I'd dated one girl in college for almost a year, but we'd both been more similar, more likely to want to stay in than go out. A real date with Jenny might be more like the two week long "relationship" I had in middle school, where we had our parents drop us off at Dairy Queen and we awkwardly held hands and she only let me kiss her, I think, because we both thought that was what you were supposed to do on a date. How to behave in a relationship felt like the kind of information I'd flushed from my brain to make room for things like how to survive an alien invasion.

It was a moot point, anyway. There wouldn't have been a relationship at all without Priton. I could imagine a scenario where we were friends easily enough, but knew myself well enough to know that pre-infestation, I would have been too intimidated by Jenny's outgoing nature to consider anything else. And, if I was honest, "friends" wouldn't have lasted long, anyway. I'd gotten really good at driving people away by isolating myself. I'd joined the Sharing in the first place because I thought making new friends might actually be easier than facing possible rejection from my old ones.

Somehow, when the world was about to end anyway, it was hard to regret the actions of the past. Sort of. If I had a time machine, I would have probably still gone back and told myself to avoid the Sharing entirely. Someone else would have been here now, in my place. Or maybe none of us would be here at all. Even as I thought that, though, I realized that was stupid. How small was the population of school staff that were still free when I started working? How small was it when we left? I wouldn't have lasted long, anyway. At least I had some say in when I entered this fucked up world.

We weren't the only people in this bizarre sort of set up. I wondered if they struggled with it as much as we did. There was a baby crawling around on B1 who had been born there and lived out their entire short life thus far within the walls of HQ. I guess things could always be worse. I'd never asked how new babies born in captivity worked in the Empire, and frankly, I didn't want to know. But was it wrong to try to be happy with what I had, while that was still possible? No one was going to judge me. Except myself. Because I was never actually very good at being happy.

"Good night," I said to Priton and Jenny as I left their room and headed for the stairs. Walking made me feel better, brought the irrational panic down a few more notches, back to the background layer of anxiety that I was learning to live with these days. The world was ending. We all might die. Or we all might live. Or some of us might die and the rest of us might end up slaves to Empire loyalists. The world was truly a bleak place if death sounded like the middle-of-the-road possibility.

There was activity at HQ at all hours of the day, since everyone had a different schedule. The main Yeerk pool didn't close for the night, neither did ours. When I reached B1, one of the people who lived in the cubbyhole room nearest the stairwell was just getting in. He was still wearing his work uniform. We nodded at each other as I passed him.

As I expected, my room was empty when I entered. I turned on the battery powered light we kept on top of our shelving unit. There weren't enough outlets for us to all have our own plug-ins. I wondered if having so many being used at once was safe. I had no idea, I wasn't an electrician, but an electrical outlet every eight feet seemed like too much to me.

I laid down on my bed, and stretched my legs up. I wasn't very tall, but even so there wasn't enough room to extend my legs fully, and so I hooked my ankles over the bar that hung down from Nick's bunk. It was not very comfortable, at all, but discomfort was what I was going for. I'd heard somewhere that people who self-harmed did it sometimes to have some kind of control, to  _feel_ something. I had no idea if that was true or just what some Hollywood writer had decided made sense to them. In my experience, Hollywood was mostly good at making me feel like I wasn't being mentally ill in  _the right way_ , because I didn't fit neatly into any of their boxes. I wasn't inclined to think they got much else right.

I wasn't really trying to hurt myself, anyway. I just wanted to do something stupid and pointless with my body just for the hell of it. I sat up, balancing myself with one hand pressed into my bed, and reached up to pull off my shoes and socks. Then settled back down again and amused myself by stretching my toes up into the exposed underside of Nick's mattress, watching the small indent appear and disappear as I moved my foot up and down. 

I knew I shouldn't think too hard about why certain things made me happy. I should just enjoy it while it lasted. The future was uncertain, but the present didn't have to seem so bleak all the time. Enjoy the little things while they lasted, and I still could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Priton's defense, I have totally used "trust me, my friend's a doctor" before IRL. It goes over about as well as it does here.
> 
> I don't think I fully thought through the implications of writing an AU where there are no Animorphs, at least not when I made that decision. But here we are, anyway.


	2. Anna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: Reference to suicide.

Jenny asked me once if I roomed with Nick just because Priton hated him.  _Technically_ no--I actually genuinely liked Nick, though he questioned my sanity frequently those days. As far as I could ever tell, he mostly liked to goad Priton because Priton made it so easy and got so flustered by it. If you asked me, it was pretty fitting karma. Still, even so, it just happened that the timing was right. Nick's old roommate was relocating, and I met his only real criteria--I was uninfested. Which seemed kind of hypocritical to me, honestly, but I guessed that there were worse things to be.

And then I actually met Ravel Five-Nine-Two.

I didn't know for sure, because I'd always been too intimidated to ask Nick--and Priton pretended to not remember Ravel's name even after I'd told him twice--but I suspected they'd been  _somebody_ in the Empire. From the way some members seemed a little nervous around them, to the fact that Nick always went to pick up new recruits on his own, it seemed to suggest something, at least. Then again, Ravel also never smiled, so maybe it was just that they looked like they were quietly disapproving of everything, all the time. 

Regardless, it was more than a little disconcerting when Ravel decided to seek me out.

" _There_ you are."

I turned around--I'd been standing at one of the interfaces by the pool, which was a usual spot for me, honestly--and saw Ravel and James striding towards me. I could see their red bandana poking out of their jeans' pocket. At least Ravel made it obvious when they were present. Unlike some people, who made me guess. "Was I missing?"

Ravel ignored my question. "I need you upstairs." And then they turned on their heel and marched back the way they came again, as if that was all that needed to be said. 

"I--okay." I had to hurry to catch up to them--they were, for some reason, walking ridiculously fast. "What's happening?"

"I need you to talk to a new recruit," Ravel said.

"That's not really--Christ, would you slow down? Some of us don't have freakishly long legs."

"We are average height," Ravel said, but they shortened their stride anyway.

"Yeah, well, I'm not." By the time I'd caught my breath, we'd reached the elevator. Ravel was pressing the button as I said, "I was going to say, talking to new recruits isn't really my area." There were people whose actual jobs it was to act as the welcome wagon. It required people skills. And a thick skin. I didn't really have either in spades.

"This one is exactly your area," Ravel said grimly. To be fair, though, most things they said sounded grim.

Ravel briefed me on the way up in the elevator, and so by the time I arrived at the holding room, I felt sick to my stomach. I was caught somewhere between wanting to charge in and wanting desperately to run away, but Ravel was still with me, and when I reached out to open the door, they proffered a key. I had a sudden flashback to my first night there, when Priton had sarcastically inquired if they got many people trying to make a run for it. Jesus.

As I turned the key in the lock, Ravel said they'd be out there in the hall if I needed them, which I thought was meant to be reassuring rather than ominous.

She was sitting at the table that was the room's only piece of furniture, leaning forward with her arms crossed on the table. She'd been glaring at the door when it opened. I wondered how long she'd been sitting like that. When she saw me, though, she straightened up. "So, you're not dead then." 

"Sorry," I said, reflexively. She sounded disappointed. So very unlike my sister. "I didn't know I was supposed to be."

Anna--or rather, the thing in her head controlling Anna--shrugged her shoulders. "Priton Six-Two-Four was a lazy fool. I figured someone must have tired of him eventually." She raised her eyebrows at me. "I didn't realize 'fool' meant 'traitor' in this instance." 

"Yeah, well." There wasn't a whole lot I could say to refute any of that. She had him pretty well pegged. "I guess his reputation precedes him."

"Not really. I did research." 

 "Oh." That made a lot more sense, actually. "If you think Priton's a traitor for coming here, why are  _you_ here?" I felt jittery. I kept my hands folded behind my back so that they wouldn't visibly shake. My sister was here.  _Here._ I hadn't seen her in more than a year--hadn't talked to her for nearly three years. I had thought, many times, about what must have happened to my family. Too late to go back and do anything. My only thought when coming to Brain Trust was that I wanted away from Priton, that I wasn't really giving up anything because I didn't _have_ anything anymore. For once, I was grateful for whatever neural misfires kept my expression mostly impassive.

The Yeerk leaned back with a petulant look. It was such an Anna look, like the look she'd get when we were young and I'd win the battle for the TV remote, that it made my insides ache. "I was forced."

"We don't force people to join." The Yeerk snorted derisively. "We  _don't,"_ I insisted. "I have friends in both recruitment and surveillance and pick up, I know what our policies are."

"My-- _her_ partner and his Yeerk brought us here," she said. "I don't know why he had to drag me into  _his_ treachery."

"You continued your host's relationship even after infestation?" Did I sound skeptical? I meant to. It occurred to me that I had no room to judge, but I knew my relationship at least tried to consider the implications of our set up. 

"I was keeping my cover," she said, a little more defensively than I thought was necessary. "I'm not a host sympathizer. And anyway," she continued, "you  _say_ you don't force anyone, but no one's allowed me to  _leave."_

I glanced back at the closed door, where Ravel was waiting. "Okay. Let me clarify. Once you're here, we can't just let you leave. It's a security risk." I paused, then said, "Well, Anna can leave. We've got people to help relocate ex-hosts who don't want to stay with us. But I don't think the people in charge are going to trust a Yeerk who's not part of the organization, out in the world, with information on us." Ex-hosts, at least, had some incentive to keep their mouths shut. They were usually involuntaries, and the last thing they typically wanted was to get wrapped back up in it all again.

"You think the Empire doesn't already know you're all here?" The Yeerk drew Anna's face into a sneer. " _Please._ You're only still around because the invasion's nearly over, anyway. This," she made a circling motion in the air with her index finger, "won't last when they run out of bigger fish to fry."

I absorbed this, filed it away for future panic, and said, "Regardless, we can't let you leave. So I can take you to our pool and we can start orientation." I didn't add that if Anna was involuntary--and I had a very hard time imagining a scenario where she wasn't--the Yeerk could expect to stay in the pool.

She didn't say anything for a long moment. Finally, "No."

"No?" I repeated.

"If I stay here, I'll be branded as much of a traitor as the rest of you. Do you know what happens to traitors?" 

"We can't let you leave," I reiterated.

"You said." Her tone had become casual. She might have been describing a math problem. She very calmly folded her hands on the table. "If I'm going to die anyway, I'd like some choice in the matter."

* * *

 

I walked with unsteady legs toward the stairwell. I'd kept my cool through the conversation with Anna's Yeerk--I didn't even know her name, and it didn't occur to me until I left her behind. I'd kept my cool when I told Ravel her decision. Her insane, nonsensical decision. Now, alone, I felt like I had a sudden case of vertigo, like the world wouldn't stop spinning off-kilter around me. A nagging voice in my head told me I shouldn't be taking the stairs when I felt like this, that I should sit down. I ignored it.

The worst part, I thought as I climbed the stairs to the second floor, wasn't the senseless loss of life. It wasn't even the confirmation that all of this was futile anyway. No, the thing that was really bothering me was the fact that I understood. I could understand feeling trapped and wanting to take the only option available to get out. To feel like you had some say in what happened to you. If you couldn't have control over your life, maybe you could at least have control over your death.

They weren't in their room, but I entered anyway. Considering my feelings about Priton being in my room without me there, this definitely made me a hypocrite, but I also knew that Priton and Jenny minded a lot less than I did. I collapsed face first on their bed, trying to slow down my breathing, which was starting to notch up towards hyperventilation. Their bedsheets smelled like the cheap, generic brand laundry soap that whoever was in charge of HQ's supplies bought. It was bizarrely comforting.

I was still laying like that when the door opened.

"Ben?" When I rolled up into a sitting position, and turned to face them, they visibly flinched. "Yikes. What's wrong?"

"Anna's downstairs," I said. Priton and Jenny's bed was pressed, lengthwise, against the wall with the foot of the bed pointing towards the door. I leaned back to rest my head against the wall, letting my feet dangle over the edge. "And her Yeerk is refusing to leave her."

There was silence for a long moment. "Well," they said finally, "that's okay, right? She has to come out eventually. A couple days of stubbornness isn't--"

"No." They had started to move toward me, but stopped now, probably realizing I didn't want to be touched just then. Instead, they settled onto the other bed, mimicking my position. "I mean she's not coming out at all. Not to feed, nothing."

"Oh." I hadn't realized a person could really turn green. "That's--Jesus. Fuck." And then, for good measure,  _"Fuck."_

Another time, I might've smiled. If you weren't sure who you were talking to, just wait for the gratuitous swearing. 

I closed my eyes, not wanting to look at them for a moment. Instead I concentrated on regulating my breathing. When I finally opened my eyes again, Priton was staring at the ceiling. "Priton." He looked at me. "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course," he said, cautiously. 

"If I'd told you I didn't want to come here, what would you have done?"

He was quiet for a moment too long. "We wouldn't have come."

"Really?"

"Of course," he said again. When I continued to stare at him incredulously, Priton sighed. "Fine. We'd have still come eventually. I'm bad at respecting other people's wishes. Is that what you want me to say?"

It was about what I'd expected, but somehow it didn't make me feel better to be right. "We'd have come anyway because Jenny was here," I guessed.

Priton sighed loudly, rolling his head back. "Yes, Ben, that's the  _only possible reason._ That absolutely explains everything I've done since we got here. Nail on the head. You've hit it."

I tilted my head to the side, curious suddenly. For someone so argumentative, it took an awful lot of digging to finally hit a nerve with Priton. "Nothing you've done since I met you has made any sense to me," I said. "You spent two years making me miserable, and then we got here and you wanted to be my best friend."

Priton didn't look up, but he said, "I never wanted you to be miserable."

I made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Yeah. Okay."

"I didn't." He sat up now. "I couldn't help how things started. I know it doesn't mean anything, but it didn't start how I'd have wanted it to either." 

"Priton." I leveled my gaze at him, trying and probably failing to look as exasperated as he made me feel. "You practically made it your mission to drive me crazy."

"I was lonely!" We both jumped, surprised by the loudness of his voice. "I was lonely," he said more evenly, "and you were there and I--" He made a choking noise, then grimaced like he'd gotten a sudden pain, and finally waved a hand in the air. "You know." All the hallmarks of a Priton apology. God knows what he'd have to do before he actually managed to say "I'm sorry." I had a feeling I didn't want to know.

I wasn't really looking for an apology, though. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. "I thought you hated me," I said.

"If this is what you think a hate relationship is like, I have serious concerns."

"Not  _now,"_ I said. "Before."

"I have never hated you," Priton said, unhesitating. When I stared at him without saying anything, he asked, "What?"

"I literally tried to kill us."

"When?"

"A month in. You called it, and I quote, 'Jedi chokehold bullshit.'"

"Oh  _that."_ He shrugged. "I mean. I'd probably have done the same thing if our roles were reversed. And anyway, you didn't succeed. So." 

"Now I have serious concerns for _you_."

When I got up to leave eventually, I felt oddly better. Not good by any stretch--I was still horrified--but it felt like a little bit of weight had been taken off. A tiny bit, anyway. As I started to go, I held out my hand to Priton. He took it, and I squeezed his hand for a second before letting go. "We're okay," I said. Because we had to be. Something had to be okay. I thought that if things were different, if the future wasn't so bleak and our existences here so lonely, that this would have been very different. But it was what it was. I thought Priton probably knew that, too.

* * *

 

It took two days. Someone had been posted outside the holding room, so that when the time came, Anna could be let out--or if her Yeerk changed her mind. No one seemed particularly comfortable with the situation, but there also wasn't anything anyone could do to stop it. There wasn't really a way to force a Yeerk out of a host that didn't cause harm to one or both of them. I think someone went in to talk to them, but I guess they left when it became apparent nothing anyone said would help.

I'd taken to going down to check on things a few times a day. I didn't actually go in. It seemed morbid, and maybe cruel, to hang around while another sapient being literally starved to death. Except it felt morbid hanging around  _outside,_ too. There was no winning.

When I came downstairs for my mid-morning check-in on the second day, the guy sitting out front stood when he saw me. I'd seen him the morning before, too, though there'd been a couple other people "standing guard" when I'd come down at other times. "I don't think it's long," he told me. "It's been quiet in there for awhile."

I hadn't noticed a lot of noise before this, but I supposed he'd know better than I would.

I took up residence in the chair outside the door to wait. It wasn't just that it felt like I ought to be there, it was that I didn't think there was a real choice. I hadn't been able to see my sister in a very long time, and I had the distinct feeling that this was somehow my fault. I was going to be there for her now.

I don't know how long I sat out there. It felt like hours, with nothing to do but think about what was happening inside the room. I suddenly missed the early days, when I thought all Yeerks were evil bastards. Now I knew too many personally. Yeah, some of them were still assholes--even a lot of the ones campaigning for peace inhabited a definite moral grey area--but they were also just people, trying to find their way in the universe, just like everyone else. It was a lot easier to hate someone if you didn't think of them as a person.

After a long while, I thought I heard something from behind the door. I stood up immediately, turning to stare at it, my heart suddenly thumping hard in my chest. A moment later, the doorkob wobbled. Then, a knock.

My hands shook as I unlocked the door, and then it swung open, and there was Anna, standing on the other side, looking somehow simultaneously older and younger than her twenty-three years. We stood there, frozen, staring at each other for a long moment. Finally, I tried to smile, and said, "Hey."

Anna took an unsteady step towards me. I reached out my hand to help her, and she grasped onto my arm with more force than I anticipated. Surprised, I took an instinctive step forward, and then she was falling into me and I was wrapping my arms around my trembling sister while she cried into my chest.

* * *

 

"How do you feel about tea?"

It was a couple days later. Anna had been busy getting settled, and figuring things out. I thought she'd probably stay. I was here. Her boyfriend was staying. At the time I'd left, their relationship was still new enough that Anna hadn't introduced him. i had so many questions, but for her being there now, he was already my favorite of any guy my sister had ever brought home, and I hadn't even met him yet. All that aside, there didn't seem to be a lot of point to relocating at this point. Better to stay close to whoever you had left.

We were in the kitchen, and I was digging through the cupboards. It was late enough that no one was likely to come in there, and late enough that we should have been asleep. Anna said she couldn't sleep, though, and I knew that if I tried I'd have nightmares, so there we were. I was pretty sure I'd heard that tea was meant to be calming. My only experience with the stuff was when I was a little kid and my mom used to make me tea with cinnamon when I had a sore throat. Or my aunt liked Long Island Iced Tea, but that wasn't actually tea. I tried not to think too hard about either of them.

Anna didn't answer my question for a few moments longer than was necessary. I waited. "I don't remember," she said finally.

I stared into the cupboard, wondering if there was something in there for trauma. "I've heard good things about chamomile." I pulled down a box of tea bags and retrieved two mugs from somewhere else. We didn't have a kettle, so I settled on heating up the water in the microwave. As I got one mug going, I said, "I couldn't remember my middle name for the first month. I only knew it started with an E because it was on my driver's license."

I had my back to Anna, but I knew she was sitting at the table behind me, and I could picture her face as words tried to form. "Why is it like this?"

"I don't know." I stared into the microwave, watching the mug move back and forth slowly on its plate. "No one I've talked to has had a good idea, but if I had to guess... Atrophy."

"Atrophy,"Anna repeated. Her tone was too flat for me to tell if it was a question.

"Yeah. Like when you can't use a limb for a while, and you start to lose muscle mass. I think it might be like that, except for mental functioning." The microwave beeped, and I pulled the steaming mug out, dropped a tea bag in the water, and set it all down in front of Anna before readying the next mug. "And then all this--" I wave my hand around--"is like physical therapy for the brain."

Anna made a soft, thoughtful noise. When I turned to look at her, she was methodically dunk her tea bag up and down, up and down in the water rather than drinking her tea. She said, "I don't think that's how atrophy works. Like, our bodies have been in use this whole time." She paused. More dunking. Up, down. "Our brains have been working this whole time, technically."

"Yeah, I guess," I conceded. The microwave beeped again. "Our consciousness, then."

"Is that even possible?"

"I have no idea. You're the psychology major. It's just a half-baked theory." I dropped a tea bag into my own mug and went to join her at the table. "And it doesn't really explain why voluntaries have an easier time adjusting."

We sat in silence for a while. I tried the tea. I wasn't sure I liked it, but I kept drinking it anyway, just for something to do.

"Were you voluntary?" Anna asked.

"No," I said, and didn't elaborate. I hadn't told her about Priton and Jenny yet. I didn't really know how to explain. Instead I asked, "When did... when did you..." I made a senseless, helpless motion. 

She seemed to get it, at least. "Two weeks after you disappeared."

I swallowed back the lump forming in my throat. God. God, I was an idiot. A selfish idiot. I hadn't asked about Eileen yet. I was afraid to. I knew Priton had seen her once, forever ago, but that told me nothing. 

Anna finally stopped dunking her tea bag and took a sip from her mug. Her expression didn't change at all as she said, "That's rancid." She set down the mug and slid it away from her. "What about you?"

"About a month before graduation," I said. "Up till the day after I last saw you." 

Anna let out a long breath. I wondered what she'd thought had happened this whole time, if she'd gone over every interaction she'd had with me and wondered who she'd been talking to. I just sat and watched my sister, wondering what all had happened to  _her_ in the interim. Every time we'd talked in the last two days, I couldn't help staring, trying to pick out the familiar from the alien shell she seemed to have been left with. She was growing out her hair. She'd dyed it blonde since high school, but now it had reverted back to its natural brown, a little lighter and wavier than mine. It made her look like our mom, I realized suddenly. Like a younger version of our mom, who'd only been forty when she died. I wondered if Anna even remembered. She'd been eight, and I'd been ten, when our mom died, but chemo had made her hair fall out long before then, and when it came back, it hadn't looked the same as it had. Sitting here, having just been to hell and back, Anna looked like our mother had healthy, and the thought suddenly made me want to cry.

"What happens now?" Anna asked.

"I don't know." God, I wish I knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter went through a lot of rewrites over the last few days--not helped by the fact that my power went out mid-writing and I lost half the chapter. SAVE FREQUENTLY. 
> 
> My original intention was to write three chapters, one-shot style, for Ben, Priton and Jenny, but then this happened. So much for that.


	3. Jenny

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place after Anna is freed, but before her and Ben's chat.

Orientation was a mostly private affair. It had to be, I guess, for consent reasons, but it seemed almost meaningless to me now. What did any of it matter if we were going to let people die anywyay?

She was in her room. I knew without asking that Priton wasn't there, because Jenny was reading the last book they'd gotten me from the library. I teased Priton that he didn't know how to read, but for someone who seemed to enjoy so many human things, I wasn't sure I'd ever seen him willingly read a novel.

"Hey." Jenny looked up at me. I don't know what I looked like just then. Sometimes now I could make my face do what I wanted it to, and sometimes I wouldn't concentrate hard enough and I'd get this dead sort of expression. Which one was I managing now? 

Jenny set her book aside and held out her arm. "Come here."

I felt like a little kid, crawling up onto her bed and curling into her side. I closed my eyes, felt Jenny's hand on my hair, and tried to feel comforted. It had been such a long time since I'd had anyone to do this, I didn't know what to do anymore. When I'd come upstairs, I'd thought I might cry. I felt heavy and spent, and like I needed a release, but now nothing came. Instead, my body was shaking so hard I thought I was going to vibrate out of my skin. Jenny made hushing noises, but she didn't say anything, really. No platitiudes that everything would be okay.

"I'm sorry," I said after awhile. 

I felt rather than saw Jenny shake her head. "It's okay. It's been a long few days." She was still stroking my hair, which was helping. Kind of. "Is it over?" I nodded. She drew in a deep breath. "Priton's not here," she told me. I nodded again, and this time Jenny shuffled us until we were both lying down.

I tried to shut off my mind. I didn't want to think about anything. I didn't want to think about Anna and what she'd been through. I didn't want to think about how close to the end we were. I didn't want to think about the dead Yeerk downstairs or what someone would have to do with it. What were Yeerk funeral rights? Did dead Yeerks decay at the bottom of pools? Priton had said that they died when they spawned new, baby Yeerk grubs, but not every Yeerk reproduced, surely. I'd also heard a lot of discussions about balancing the chemicals in the pool--too much of this nutrient of that nutrient could cause some disease that could take out half the pool before we knew how bad it was. When that sort of things happened, did they just leave the dead to rot at the bottom of the pool? I shuddered at the thought and felt Jenny's arm tighten around me. When we'd found a family with two dead Yeerks in Colorado, Priton had thrown the Yeerks off a bridge, but that had been because we couldn't just leave them for someone to find.

I don't know how, and I didn't mean to, but I must have dozed off at some point, because when I came to again, I was alone. I was lying on my side, and I rolled over and up into a sitting position. The light was still on. The duvet from the other bed had been laid over me, and was pooling now in my lap. 

As I was trying to reorient myself, the door opened and Jenny re-entered. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. Giving me space, probably. It reminded me of the way Priton disappeared into the pool, or else became suddenly unfindable when things got too overwhelming and he didn't want to deal with it. I wondered how fragile the two of us must have seemed. Poor boys, too afraid of their own, real feelings. I felt like such a stereotype, but I guess if the shoe fits.

"How long was I asleep?" I asked, pulling the duvet off me.

"Only like twenty minutes." She didn't say anything for a long minute, maybe waiting for me to say something else. When I didn't, she asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really." I rubbed my eyes, feeling absurdly tired, though it was probably only noon. "I just... I don't get it."

Jenny tactfully refrained from pointing out that apparently we were talking about it anyway. I was told that I did that a lot. "What don't you get?"

"Why she'd want to starve. Remember Priton's reaction in Colorado?"

Jenny's smile was more of a grimace. "To be fair, Priton's reaction there was partly how blasé those people were about casually murdering a sentient creature." She leaned her head back against the door. "You know how some people are afraid of snakes? Like, really scared, not like they just don't like them or think they're creepy. Those people who can't even have a conversation about snakes for too long without it freaking them out."

I thought about this for a moment. "You think Priton is phobic about dying?" I guess if you were going to be afraid of something, that was a pretty solid choice.

But Jenny was shaking her head. "No. Well--I mean, I doubt he's too crazy about the idea. But we talk about dying all the time around here. We might all die tomorrow. The Empire might decide to storm the place. Or blast it into the ground with dracon cannons. We could all contract some nasty disease that wipes us out because we live in such tight quarters and have, at last count, one med student, two nurses, and a veterinary assistant." Put like that, I almost wondered how we weren't dead already. "Point is, when that stuff comes up, he's cool as a cucumber. Like, whatever, no use getting riled up about 'what ifs,' especially when we've got so little else to distract us. It'd drive us crazy."

"Nice for him that he can block it out."

"Seriously. It's not fair." Jenny crooked a smile for real this time, though it didn't last. "But starvation freaks him out. By all accounts it's the least pleasant way to die, and I don't think anyone wants to do it, but we've seen people do it on purpose before," she pointed out. "Only one of those Yeerks in Colorado was murdered. The other one decided keeping his family safe was more important than his own life."

"I guess." Though I wasn't sure if that instance counted as purposeful so much accepting one's unfortunate circumstances.

"I don't think Priton thinks anything's that important," Jenny said. I couldn't hear judgment in her tone, and I wondered if she'd decided that the end of the world meant making compromises, too. "But I think he's built it--starving--up in his head. It's how they execute traitors a lot of the time, and apparently it's a very public thing." She shuddered and I felt the hair raise on my arms. "I swear to God, though, he realized the other day that there are too many of us to make an example of, and it made him almost happy. Or relieved, at least."

"He thinks there's too many of us to kill?" 

"No. Just that it'd have to be quicker."

Now  _I_ shuddered. "We're seriously fucked, aren't we?"

"Maybe." Jenny pushed away from the door. "Change of subject?" I spread my hands in a sort of "go ahead" gesture. "This is probably a bad time to bring this up, but there's never a good time for anything important." Wasn't that the truth. Jenny walked to her shelving unit, which was against the far wall. She bent down to peer at the shelves, then turned back to me. "You're here all the time. You're here more than you're in your own room. I think you should just stay."

I laughed, despite myself. "God, you're blunt sometimes," I said, though it wasn't without affection.

Jenny smiled. "Hey, if I wasn't blunt once in a while, we wouldn't have a reason to have this conversation."

"True." I looked around the room, as if the answer could be found in the bare, white walls. "I have to think about it," I said, but even as I said it I knew what was going to happen. Sometimes--between Jenny, who had no qualms taking charge and saying what she thought, and Priton, who didn't always understand what the word "intrusive" meant--it got so I needed to assert myself, too. 

"Okay," Jenny said, like she expected me to say that.

I glanced at the spare bed. "Are we going to push the beds together or what?"

Jenny stared at me for a second. Then, clearly trying not to laugh, said, "If you want."

I stood up. There were things I probably needed to do. I should go see my sister. Jenny should go get Priton, who was probably wondering why his feeding time had been extended. I didn't move to leave immediately, though. "We're seriously screwed up, aren't we?"

Jenny hesitated. "Yeah."

I sighed. "At least we know, I guess." For what that was worth. "I'll see you later."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert necessary disclaimer about the unhealthy nature of this relationship here. I'm putting "healthy relationships" on my writing bucket list for whatever I write after Brain Trust.


End file.
